An ongoing review of politics and culture

I have been reluctant to debate Ross Douthat on his favorite question because I really think Sarah Palin’s family has been the subject of way too much discussion. But there is a real question lurking in the bushes here, and I wanted to air it.

Here’s the decision tree for a nice girl who finds herself in trouble:

Douthat and Weisberg seem to agree that option #3 – single motherhood – is a Bad Choice. And we know they disagree – on a variety of grounds – on how bad option #1 – abortion – is, with Weisberg no doubt feeling it’s not something anyone would want to go through, but often enough the best of bad options, and Douthat clearly feeling it’s profoundly evil in all circumstances.

But what about the choice between option #2 – adoption – and option #4 – teenage marriage?

If the statistics are accurate, a teenage marriage is much more likely to end in divorce than a marriage entered into at a more mature age. A young couple might “make a go of it” but they are off to a very inauspicious start.

So: what’s better for the child? To be put up for adoption or raised by a young couple relatively likely to be emotionally unprepared for parenthood and relatively likely to divorce? And what’s better for the mother? And does it matter what’s better for the mother?

Obviously, there’s no one answer to that question – the situation will vary with circumstances. And, unfortunately, the circumstances that make for a likely better outcome for a young family are also the circumstances that likely make for a more successful adoption. Either way, though, there are real risks and real likelihood of pain. I hate personalizing this, but as an adoptive parent and the son of parents who divorced when I was still a young child, I have some small personal insight into both sides of this one.

One thing we can say, though: putting the baby up for adoption is declining a burden, and raising the child is taking it up. That’s a choice with real consequences. The emotional ones may be hard to measure. The material ones, though, are pretty clear, at least in aggregate.

Now, I was having a conversation with the mother of one of my son’s playmates the other day, a woman who, with her husband, had once lived in Alaska. When she lived there, she was recently married but as yet had no children. The Alaskans she met were almost universally flabbergasted that she, a bride in her early twenties, still had no children. Strangers assumed there must be something medically wrong. Teen pregnancy struck her as extremely common – some of the girls married and some didn’t, but a whole lot of them were getting knocked up.

There’s something frankly appealing about a world like that, a world that is just flat-out baby-friendly, and doesn’t sweat the complications. It bespeaks an abundance, both material and spiritual. But whether or not that world is real in Alaska, it’s not that way down in the lower forty-eight. Down here, we are too familiar with scarcity.

There is a tension in the socially conservative worldview on these matters. On the one hand, it’s a worldview that embraces a bourgeois view of life – gratification-deferring, risk-averse, future-oriented, status-conscious. It preaches work, thrift, continence, fidelity. But that bourgeois view exists in tension with a Christian view that embraces life as such, and taking up one’s cross, and isn’t all that concerned about where one gets to or how long the journey is so long as one is walking with the Lord.

Leave a Reply

I was wondering the same thing. I find Ross’s support for increased teenage fecundity (mentioned in a related post) to be pretty odd, but I guess a natural consequence of finding both abortion and birth control distasteful. (I’m sure about the former but unclear on the latter.) I echo your fear that more teen marriages will just mean more early 20’s divorces, and I’ve always felt that the coercive aspect of marriages due to pregnancy really troubles our vision of what a loving and stable marriage should be.

Personally, I really wish that more teens used option 0, practicing safe sex with effective birth control, but well… most teens are stupid about stuff like that. I know that it’s unclear to what degree safe-sex education programs actually increase the use of contraception, but I can’t imagine the efforts of certain Christian conservative elements to undermine those programs (for example, by lying about the failure rate of condoms) can help any.

Actually, Noah, I’d argue that there very much are worlds like that in the lower 48! Now, I left Berkeley, and I’ll grant you that the Bay Area is a hell of a child unfriendly place, especially for younger parents. But now, every family around me has kids, and most of them are quite younger than I, and that seems to be not too uncommon in the “heartland.” One of the few lifestyle improvements.

Freddie: my impression is that abstinence education and sex education alike show very poor results in terms of changing teenage sexual behavior. Because teenagers are stupid.

But some teenagers are stupider than others. Teenage pregnancy – whether it ends in abortion, adoption, single-motherhood or teenage marriage – is a whole lot more common among the less-educated and lower-income parts of the population. That’s the class subtext of the arguments about the Palins. They are dealing with a family situation that is much more common out there in “real” America than it is among the professional-class elite. I think a lot of the celebration of how they are handling Bristol’s pregnancy, and fury at the media for criticizing them, has to do with a feeling of “see – we can handle this on our own; we don’t need any helpful advice from you” aimed at people who, honestly, probably don’t have the standing to give advice, because they aren’t living in the same place.

I’m not a woman so I don’t claim to understand the bonding factor, but why isn’t giving the baby up for adoption the default setting for teen pregnancies? Given the typically self-centered nature of teens, it should be an easy sell for doctors, social workers and the media to encourage girls to do right by their baby and give it up to someone in a better position to care for it?

Sanjay: Alaska has the second-highest white total fertility rate in the country, after Utah (obviously a special case), followed by Idaho. Alaska is the only state I’m aware of that will pay you to have children – because the dividend on the Permanent Fund goes out on a per-capita basis. It’s not completely unique, but it is special.

I don’t think Berkeley is child-unfriendly. Like Brooklyn, it’s a great place to raise children – if you can afford to. And there’s the rub.

I do not know that I have read you before Mr. Millman but this nicely encapsulates a problem I’ve thought about a lot lately. William Saletan notes that in some ways abortion is becoming a middle class value and is in some places already. I also think it matters that the girl is not alone. I personally, were I a father of such a girl, could not urge her to give up the child and would want to raise it by the family. However, it is clearly better for the child if the mother has no husband and little or no family to give the child up. I a world of abortion on demand and the death of marriage as an institution perceived right and wrong are topsy turvey.

Alaska also has one of the highest rates of gay adoptions in the country (it ranks fourth in the percentage of adopted children in gay households – almost 9% of adopted children in Alaska have at least one gay parent) despite not being a particularly gay-friendly state – so it seems that the expectation of parenthood extends to “non-traditional” families.

Given the prevalence of such families in her state, I wish that Governor Palin could have been more supportive of legal arrangements to protect such families, such as same-sex marriage or domestic partnership benefits.

For what it is worth, I’d highly recommend a book called “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage.” There’s a lot of decision trees and back-of-the-envelope statistics here, but some sociology and ethnography may be useful. For many women living in poverty, the moral hierarchy is upside-down: being a single mom is significantly less shameful than having a divorce. Some women want the responsibility of a child early in order to keep themselves out of trouble. The opportunity costs of having an out-of-wedlock child aren’t high, and being mothers are what they aspire to as an identity. It’s not necessarily fair to say better education about condoms or teenagers “being stupid” is at fault in a lot of the cases among the poor.

And the men in their lives struggle to find jobs in the post-Fordist/Keynesian landscape, and are often more trouble than the benefits they bring. (And to prove a point for Ross, there is a lot of abortion as a tactic men use against women to fend off responsibility.) So marriage may actually be a liability. So in other words, U(3) > U(4) in the chart for the women.

rortybomb: understood, and while I haven’t read that book, I’m pretty familiar with the argument you lay out. It just wasn’t particularly germane to the point I was making about the tensions in the social conservative worldview.

And a social conservative could legitimately take the view that marriage is the answer even if that flies in the face of the decision preference of many poor women. The politics of making that point become more complicated if it does fly in their face, of course.

I was always struck in high school (and middle school, sadly) that it seemed like some of the girls getting pregnant wanted someone in their lives who would love them, unconditionally, no matter what. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many of them were effectively fatherless. I don’t know, I’m on shaky ground here and that may be unfair, but that’s how it always seemed to my teenaged self.

Heh. I do that all the time here – respond to the comments and/or whatever I’ve just been thinking of or reading that is tangential. I’ll try to keep it more on track :)

I suppose a lot of it depends on what you think of adoption – for a variety of family-related reasons, I’m incredibly pro-adoption, and (given certain circumstances) think of it as an extra-burden to carry, to give a child up. But that is almost entirely based on personal experiences.

Excellent final paragraph about bourgeoise values vs risk. Note that at one time there were Christian groups who were opposed to insurance — not just government insurance, but insurance, period. They were very much of the bourgeoise, but in this sense they would throw caution to the winds and live on the edge, trusting in God and community to take care of them. The Amish are still like that to some extent.

In that sense, it was interesting to me come across the following critique of bourgeoise values in my reading yesterday. This was not from a Christian fundamentalist, but from a Shawnee man of the 1750s, talking to a white captive who had been adopted into the tribe. But he was expressing some non-bourgeoise values that are also found in strains of Christianity:

“Brother, as you have lived with the white people, you have not had the same advantage of knowing that the great being above feeds his people, and gives them their meat in due season, as we Indians have, who are frequently out of provisions, and yet are wonderfully supplied, and that so frequently that it is evidently the hand of the great Owaneeyo that doth this: whereas the white people have commonly large stocks of tame cattle, that they can kill when they please, and also their barns and cribs filled with grain, and therefore have not the same opportunity of seeing and knowing that they are supported by the ruler of Heaven and Earth…” (In “The Ohio Frontier,” Emily Foster, ed., 1996, p 25)

Incidentally, I see a lot of parallels of this pattern Indians:Whites::Republicans:Democrats. The white Euro-Americans were willing to live more regimented lives, but were also more secure and more productive, so conquered the Native peoples. Nowadays Republicans are not willing to live the same regimented, orderly, risk-free lives that Democrats want, but the Democrat way provides more security and will probably conquer in the end.

The attitude toward babies is just one aspect of this. But it is far from being a completely consistent pattern.